Dolphin bug fixes in KDE 4.8.1

First of all, hello Planet KDE!

Most readers of Planet KDE probably think that Dolphin development is done almost exclusively by a single person. I figured that starting my own blog might be a good way to change this. I’m involved mainly with bug triaging, bug fixing, and implementing unit tests to reduce the risk of regressions. Maybe some readers will find these topics interesting :-)

I hope that my blog can make some potential new contributors realize that working on software quality is a very interesting and rewarding thing to do, and that any help in this area is welcome in every part of KDE (or any other free software project). I believe that there are many users who would like to contribute to the software they use, but don’t know a good place to start. Actually, I was in the same situation some time ago: I had used KDE for a couple of years before I got involved in a Bugsquad event in 2008. After that, I quickly started doing bug triage on my own and fixed more and more bugs myself.

You might wonder why Dolphin is the application I chose to work on. Well, there are several reasons: First of all, a file manager is an application that most people need. Knowing that a large number of users can benefit from any improvements I make is a big motivating factor for me. Moreover, the code is IMHO very nicely written, and the maintainer is always helpful and fun to work with.

Dolphin got a new view engine recently, which made working with the code even more pleasant than before. I would like to thank all users who tested it, provided feedback and reported bugs. This help is crucial for us because Dolphin can be used in so many different ways that it is impossible for a small group of developers to test everything. The most serious regressions could be fixed before the KDE 4.8.0 release thanks to the brave users who tested beta (or even self-compiled pre-beta) versions. Since then, even more users helped us to identify many more small annoyances, many of which will be gone in KDE 4.8.1. Here is a list of all Dolphin bugs that have been fixed since the KDE 4.8.0 release:

Do not make items invisible when switching previews on or off in some situations. Fixes bug 291841. See Git commit cc8f5b4.

Dolphin 2 definitely feels a lot better than its predecessor, but I miss two things:
– The option to enable/disable expandable folders in details view
– Selection rubberband in details view just like how it works in icons view

Is the second point about the rubberband taking the whole width of the view in Details View? Actually, this makes the code simpler and less bug-prone (I could point out a couple of bug reports which were caused indirectly by Dolphin 1.x’s details view selection customizations), but I agree that the way it works in Icons View feels more ‘natural’.

There (in 4.7.x) was a feature in grouped view (icons view with sorted by type mode), where I was able to select entire group by one plus-minus button on the upper-right corner of that group (group selection button?).
Here in 4.8, dolphin has lost this thing, which was very convenient in most cases, but disappeared.
Is it possible to return this thing back? How to operate (select/deselect) on sets of files based on their type by minimal finger-typping/mouse-clicking? Do I learn dolphin again?
Please do not address me to send a bug report, since I can not even name this feature. And this sounds like a humble wish to return this thing back.
This is also regards konquerior, perhaps the same widget is used to show files
Thanks!

That’s basically the new ‘Compact View’. It was indeed possible to get that kind of layout in Dolphin 1.x by modifying the ‘Icons View’ settings, but it turned out that most users did not notice this option and are a lot happier with the ‘Compact’ button.

It’s the bugs that have been fixed since KDE 4.8.0 was tagged. The first commit in the list was on January 19.

Linking to the bugs and commits was quite easy, actually. I just copied and pasted the HTML code from the current state of the 4.8.0->4.8.1 changelog, which can be found in the changelogs directory at svn.kde.org:

It’s partly automated. You have to add your fixes (with bug number and commit hash) to the file ‘changelog_branch_4_8.xml’ in that directory, run the ‘generate_changelog’ script and ‘svn commit’ your changes to the server.

BTW, we’re kind of colleagues with you :) FolderView lives right next to Dolphin in kde-baseapps, and does pretty much the same, although on a much greater scale. And we both do polishing work. Nice to meet somebody doing similar kind of fixes!

I would like to point out (if it wasn’t clear already from the post) that not all the fixes I listed were done by me. Actually, Peter fixed most of these bugs, so the ‘Thank You’ comments are also addressed to him.

Just wanted to say, that Dolphin is simply the best filemanager around. The improvements it made over the past releases are simply impressive!
I have no problems with some small glitches (mainly some missing view-updates but that may very well related to my proprietary nvidia driver) and am sure that will improve over time.

Congratulations! I’m don’t have enough technical skills to help resolving bugs or coding… but I think Dolphin is the definiteve file manager. I use it everyday in my work, at home.. and, well, I love it! Keep the good work!

Like the author of this blog, you could start helping to triage bugs. This is very much needed, for example the KDE PIM team is so overworked just reading bugreports they get no coding done. It is quite easy to help with this – see the documentation on http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad

As you see the bugsquad has not been active for a while, it would be cool if somebody (you?) could revive it.

Thanks for your help. File choose / manager is one of the things I care most about in a Desktop. Dolphin and Mac’s Finder are the only ones I like, mostly because of the column view. But I really like how Dolphin let’s you do the split view, which the Mac Finder doesn’t.

Thank you so much, to both of you ! Dolphin is extremely important, it’s crazy to see you are only 2 developers ! Also, it would make no sense at all having something super-modern and complete, if it wasn’t stable.

I would have loved to contribute but have other priorities ATM…
Cheers !

Didn’t realize you existed and doing so much great work on Dolphin until this blog post. Thanks for sharing, I always enjoy reading about all the bug fixing going on – stability and consistency is often more important to me than the one or other new feature, since those are the things which can annoy you day by day in your workflow.

I did try to take the same path into KDE some time back, but in the end I gave it up in favor of an other project.

there is a bug where sometimes if you set png it comes up white.
Or comes up wrong png.
sometimes renaming dir fixes it and sometimes changing name to png and .directory fixes it.
I have album covers set with .directory file as ./.albumcover.png etc etc.
It should take the albumcover.png for that directory which is does most the time and other times it dont’. I need either a bug fix or some script or something that clears the caches. BTW where is the cache for that? thanks.

Thanks for testing Dolphin and providing feedback, but the comment section of a blog is not a suitable place for reporting bugs. Please use bugs.kde.org for that and describe the problem in more detail, such that one can understand it at first sight (“sometimes if you set png int comes up white” is a bit unclear, one has to read everything to realize that you probably want to change a directory’s icon).

I’m not familiar with the code that handles directory icons, so I can’t tell you if there is a cache for that somewhere.

This page is definitely open for conversation :-) It’s just not the right place for reporting bugs. We have bugs.kde.org for that. Keeping track of all the issues reported there is close to impossible already. It would get even worse if bugs get reported at other places :-(

Unfortunately, the columns view made the maintenance of much of Dolphin’s code very complicated because the behaviour of this view mode differs quite considerably from the other modes. Therefore, Peter decided to drop the columns view when he rewrote the view engine. There are no plans to bring it back, sorry – things like this are just not doable for a small team of people who can only spare a couple of hours of their free time each week.